Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY I I weep for Adonais—he is [[dead]]! Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me Died Adonais; till the [[Future]] dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!" II Where wert thou, mighty [[Mother]], when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierc'd by the shaft which flies In darkness? where was lorn Urania When Adonais died? With veiled eyes, 'Mid listening Echoes, in her [[Paradise]] She sate, while one, with soft enamour'd breath, Rekindled all the fading melodies, With which, like [[flowers]] that mock the corse beneath, He had adorn'd and hid the coming bulk of Death. The Future BY <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Bowers "target="_blank"> Neal Bowers </a> (Detroit, 1950) Because the jobs were there and a man could get rich working on the line, the [[South]] retreated North to Michigan, whole families eating crackers and baloney by the side of the road, changing drivers to keep moving through corn fields and foreign towns, sundown and [[darkness]], the moon a prophecy of chrome, the stars 10 [[million]] headlights of the cars they would build. Ahead lay a city bright with steel; behind, the dark fields folded over [[everything]] they knew; and when they dozed on cramped back seats, they dreamed such dreams as the road can make, of drifting on a lake or stream or lying down in hay to dream of traveling, so that when they woke to a bump, a couch, a [[voice]] saying, “It’s your turn,” they were lost to themselves and took a few moments to remember their names. To My Mother BY <a href=" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-387NMCR6w"target="_blank"> EDGAR ALLAN POE</a> Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The [[angels]], whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of “Mother,” Therefore by that [[dear]] name I long have called you— You who are more than mother unto me, And fill my [[heart]] of hearts, where Death installed you In setting my Virginia's spirit free. My mother—my own mother, who died early, Was but the mother of myself; but you Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, And thus are dearer than the mother I knew By that infinity with which my [[wife]] Was dearer to my [[soul]] than its soul-life. To One in Paradise BY <a href=" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-387NMCR6w"target="_blank"> EDGAR ALLAN POE</a> Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine— A [[green]] isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine. Ah, dream too bright to last! Ah, starry [[Hope]]! that didst arise But to be overcast! A voice from out the Future cries, “On! on!”—but o’er the Past (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies Mute, motionless, aghast! For, alas! alas! with me The [[light]] of Life is o’er! No more—no more—no more— (Such language holds the solemn sea To the sands upon the shore) Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, Or the stricken [[eagle]] soar! And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams— In what ethereal dances, By what eternal [[streams]]. Philadelphia Flowers <a href=" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/roberta-hill-whiteman"target="_blank"> ROBERTA HILL WHITEMAN</a> I In the cubbyhole entrance to Cornell and [[Son]], a woman in a turquoise sweater curls up to sleep. Her right arm seeks a cold spot in the stone to release its worry and her legs stretch against the [[middle]] hinge. I want to ask her in for coffee, to tell her go sleep in the extra bed upstairs, but I’m a guest, unaccustomed to this place where [[homeless]] people drift along the square bordering Benjamin <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin"> Benjamin Franklin </a> Parkway. From her [[portrait]] on the mantel, Lucretia Mott asks when will Americans see how all forms of oppression blight the possibilities of a people. The passion for preserving Independence Square should reach this nameless woman, settling in the heavy heat of [[August]], exposed to the glare of every passerby. The Book of the Dead Man (#3) BY <a href=" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Bell"target="_blank"> Marvin_Bell </a> 1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life. Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life. Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research his makeup. He wants to study things [[outside]] himself if he can find them. Moving, the dead man makes the sound of bone on bone. He bends a knee that doesn’t wish to bend, he raises an arm that argues with a shoulder, he turns his head by throwing it wildly to the side. He envies the [[lobster]] the protective sleeves of its limbs. He believes the jellyfish has it easy, floating, letting everything pass through it. He would like to be a <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=starfish&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=qhamU6WxKMG1yASxzoLACQ&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=600 "target="_blank"> starfish</a> , admired for its shape long after. Everything the dead man said, he now takes back. Not as a lively young man demonstrates sincerity or regret. A young dead man and an old dead man are two [[different]] things. A young dead man is oil, an old dead man is water. A young dead man is bread and butter, an old dead man is bread and water—it’s a difference in construction, also architecture. The dead man was there in the beginning: to the dead man, the sky is a crucible. In the dead man’s lifetime, the [[planet]] has changed from lava to ash to cement. But the dead man flops his feathers, he brings his wings up over his head and has them touch, he bends over with his beak to the floor, he folds and unfolds at the line where his armor creases. The dead man is open to [[change]] and has deep pockets. The dead man is the only one who will live forever. Winter Sunrise Outside a Café BY JOSEPH HUTCHISON Near <a href=" https://www.google.com/maps/@46.0132226,-112.5065562,11z"target="_blank"> Butte</a>, Montana A crazed sizzle of blazing bees in the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> word </a> EAT. Beyond it, thousands of stars have faded like deserted flowers in the thin light washing up in the distance, flooding the snowy mountains bluff by bluff. Moments later, the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> sign </a> blinks, winks dark, and a white-aproned cook— surfacing in the murky sheen of the window—leans awhile like a cut lily . . . staring out into the famished blankness he knows he must go home to.The Lobster BY CARL RAKOSI Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms, green sand, pebbles, broken shells. Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms, gray sand, pebbles, bubbles rising. Plasma-bearer and slow- motion benthos! The fishery vessel Ion drops anchor here collecting plankton smears and fauna. Plasma-bearer, visible sea purge, sponge and kelpleaf. Halicystus the Sea Bottle resembles emeralds and is the largest cell in the world. Young sea horse Hippocampus twenty minutes old, nobody has ever seen this marine freak blink. It radiates on terminal vertebra a comb of twenty upright spines and curls its rocky <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> tail </a> . Saltflush lobster bull encrusted swims backwards <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> from </a> the rock.Different Ways to Pray BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> There </a> was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence, as if this shedding of syllables could somehow fuse them to the sky. There were the men who had been shepherds so long they walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, and were happy in spite of the pain, because there was also happiness. Some prized the pilgrimage, wrapping themselves in new white linen to ride buses across miles of vacant sand. When they arrived at Mecca they would circle the holy places, on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return, their lean faces housing mystery. While for certain cousins and grandmothers the pilgrimage occurred daily, lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes. These were the ones present at births, humming quietly to perspiring mothers. The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses, forgetting how easily children soil clothes. There were those who didn’t care about praying. The young ones. The ones who had been to America. They told the old ones, you are wasting your time. Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones. They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig, the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone. And occasionally there would be one who did none of this, the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool, who beat everyone at dominoes, insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats, and was famous for his <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> laugh </a> .On What Planet BY KENNETH REXROTH Uniformly over the whole countryside The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward; The autumn haze drifts in deep bands Over the pale water; White egrets stand in the blue marshes; Tamalpais, Diablo, <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> St</a>. Helena Float in the air. Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill We look out over fifty miles of sinuous Interpenetration of mountains and sea. Leading up a twisted chimney, Just as my eyes rise to the level Of a small cave, two white owls Fly out, silent, close to my face. They hover, confused in the sunlight, And disappear into the recesses of the cliff. All day I have been watching a new climber, <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> A </a>young girl with ash blonde hair And gentle confident eyes. She climbs slowly, precisely, With unwasted grace. While I am coiling the ropes, Watching the spectacular sunset, She turns to me and says, quietly, “It must be very beautiful, the sunset, On Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.”Change BY WENDY VIDELOCK Change is the new, improved word for <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> god </a> , lovely enough to raise a song or implicate a sea of wrongs, mighty enough, like other gods, to shelter, bring together, and estrange us. Please, god, we <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> seem </a> to say, change us.Darkness Starts BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN A shadow in the shape of a house slides out of a house and loses its shape on the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> lawn </a> . Trees seek each other as the wind within them dies. Darkness starts inside of things but keeps on going when the things are gone. Barefoot careless in the farthest <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> part </a> of the yard children become their cries.Everything Is Free BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE Wipe away tears, Set free your fears: Everything is free. Only the lonely Need much money: Everything is <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> free </a> . Don’t try to bind The love you find: Everyone is free. Your lover’s yours — Surrender force: Everyone is free. The sun melts down, Spreads <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> gold </a> around: Everything is free. The rain is spent Lending flowers scent: Everything is free. The love you live, The life you give: Everything is free. My Voice BY RAFAEL CAMPO To cure myself of wanting Cuban songs, I wrote a Cuban song about the need For people to suppress their fantasies, Especially unhealthy ones. The song Began by making reference to the sea, Because the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> sea </a> is like a need so great And deep it never can be swallowed. Then The song explores some common myths But the Cuban people and their folklore: The story of a little Carib boy Mistakenly abandoned to the sea; The legend of a bird who wanted song So desperately he gave up flight; a queen Whose strength was greater than a rival king’s. The <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> song </a> goes on about morality, And then there is a line about the sea, How deep it is, how many creatures need Its nourishment, how beautiful it is To need. The song is ending now, because I cannot bear to hear it any longer. I call this song of needful love my voice. South Country BY KENNETH SLESSOR After the whey-faced anonymity Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush, After the rubbing and the hit of brush, You come to the South Country As if the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> argument </a> of trees were done, The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains, All ended by these clear and gliding planes Like an abrupt solution. And over the flat earth of empty farms The monstrous continent of air floats back Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black, Bruised flesh of thunderstorms: Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge, Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light, So huge, from such infinities of height, You walk on the sky’s beach While even the dwindled hills are small and bare, As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful, Something below pushed up a knob of skull, Feeling its way to <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> air </a> .I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open BY YEHUDA AMICHAI TRANSLATED BY CHANA BLOCH AND CHANA KRONFELD I My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight with its flowers and plants, alien and odd in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct. The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest, places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself in a green maze, and <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> Keep </a> Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers. The upper body above the navel—an English park pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike, humanlike, in our image, after our likeness, its arms linking up with the big night all around. And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve, wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve, and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth polished stones with dark vegetation between them, precise paths fraught with meaning and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father and the commandments of my mother are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play are my children. And the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> life </a> my life. 2 I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea. The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these, are the stars above me that cannot be numbered. 3 And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt: the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land, two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left. Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert, perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span. 4 Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That’s all we are. 5 What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait. I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable (the one thing that’s stable in this world), I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree, run back to the camera, press the timer, run back again to that place near the tree, and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution. That is my life span. God develops the picture in His big darkroom. And here is the picture: white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy, eyebrows black, like the charred lintels above the windows in a house that burned down. My life span is over. 6 I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah, I wasn’t even among the survivors. And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt. I came to the Promised Land by sea. No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope, I still have within me the lust to search for living water with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows. Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers. Jewish history and world history grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year get ahead of each other or fall behind, leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion. Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide, or to sink all the way down. 7 I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment millions of human beings are standing at crossroads and intersections, in jungles and deserts, showing each other where to turn, what the right way is, which direction. They explain exactly where to go, what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop and ask again. There, over there. The second turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right, near the white house, by the oak tree. They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there, as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion. I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.A Chest of Angels BY JOHN REIBETANZ 1. To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited landscape as far from nature as you can get without actually leaving the planet, a man-made moon waste on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, fired in the sun’s kiln through unending afternoons when I was nine or ten. I can never get the whole scene put together in my head, thanks to whatever guardian spirit flags down potentially dangerous intruders on the verge of <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> memory </a> , but parts of me hold parts of it: my ears play out the hissing wires’ repeated rise and fall, <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> dry </a> waves breaking above pavement; my nostrils chafe where fumes of gasoline weep from soft tarred patches in the asphalt; through a chainlink grid, my eyes take in some lot’s trapped beach, its black sand an amalgam of gravel, soot, and broken glass; or they blink in sequence with the traffic light’s perpetual solitaire at a carless intersection, flicking over greens, ambers, reds; my hands remember enough not to touch the shut steel trap doors of delivery chutes where air trembles over surfaces as at their beginnings in a furnace. What fills my mind to bursting is emptiness, the spirit of inverted Genesis transforming light and water’s urge towards fullness into a miracle of unearthly loss. 2. Sentries, a pair of gasoline pumps napped. Their rubber arms dangled groundwards and looped back up, hanging slack from the brass lapel their trigger-fingers hooked at shoulder height. They were no angels, but kept the gate of hell whenever I made visits to the angels. Behind them, next to a roll-up garage door always rolled up, with an invisible car always risen above the stone lintel on the hydraulic lift, a soft drink cooler sat coffin-like against the stucco wall. And always songs from a hidden radio promised cool mountain rivers to the hot flat city: somebody else must have listened, but I never saw a soul in all my visits. The angels’ wings fluttered the moment I raised the lid, a potent shimmer, as if the sun itself shone from the chest, not its reflections playing off the steel bars and icy waters. The angels sat in rows between the bars, their orders chevroned by the shapes and colours of their glass capes: the bluish, scalloped whorl of cherubim, the powers’ straight sheer crystal, the emerald flare of flaming seraphim— all emissaries from the sky-washed shore of heaven. To put a coin in the dispenser, slide one of them along its plated channel and lift it free through the chest’s narrow gate— to kiss the cold stars of its distillation— was not important; it was only important to see the angels swimming in the glitter and dip my fingers in their flickering water at the centre of that man-made desert, knowing that they were man-made, and might shatter.Dear Drought BY AMY BEEDER Offer your usual posy of goatheads. Proffer sharp garlands of thistle & Incas’ thin down; of squash bugs strung on blighted stems; send back necklaced every reeking pearl I crushed, each <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> egg </a> cluster that I scraped away with knife or twig or thumbnail. Wake me sweat-laced from a dream of hidden stables: the gentle foals atremble, stem-legged, long-neglected. Dear drought <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> our </a> summer’s corn was overrun again with weed & cheat; the bitter zinnias fell to bits. Dear yearlings our harvest is lattice & husk.My Heart and I BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING I. ENOUGH ! we're tired, my heart and I. We sit beside the headstone thus, And wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly The hard types of the mason's knife, As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life With which we're tired, my <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> heart </a> and I. II. You see we're tired, my heart and I. We dealt with books, we trusted men, And in our own blood drenched the pen, As if such colours could not fly. We walked too straight for fortune's end, We loved too true to keep a friend ; At last we're tired, my heart and I. III. How tired we feel, my heart and I ! We seem of no use in the world ; Our fancies <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> hang </a> grey and uncurled About men's eyes indifferently ; Our voice which thrilled you so, will let You sleep; our tears are only wet : What do we here, my heart and I ? IV. So tired, so tired, my heart and I ! It was not thus in that old time When Ralph sat with me 'neath the lime To watch the sunset from the sky. Dear love, you're looking tired,' he said; I, smiling at him, shook my head : 'Tis now we're tired, my heart and I. V. So tired, so tired, my heart and I ! Though now none takes me on his arm To fold me close and kiss me warm Till each quick breath end in a sigh Of happy languor. Now, alone, We lean upon this graveyard stone, Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I. VI. Tired out we are, my heart and I. Suppose the world brought diadems To tempt us, crusted with loose gems Of powers and pleasures ? Let it try. We scarcely care to look at even A pretty child, or God's blue heaven, We feel so tired, my heart and I. VII. Yet who complains ? My heart and I ? In this abundant earth no doubt Is little room for things worn out : Disdain them, break them, throw them by And if before the days grew rough We once were loved, used, — well enough, I think, we've fared, my heart and I.My Soul BY STEVIE SMITH In the flame of the flickering fire The sins of my soul are <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> few </a> And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed With a solitary view. But the eye of eternal consciousness Must blink as a bat blinks bright Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled On the brink of eternal night. <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> Oh </a> feed to the golden fish his egg Where he floats in his captive bowl, To the cat his kind from the womb born blind, And to the Lord my soul.To the Young Wife BY CHARLOTTE ANNA PERKINS GILMAN Are you content, you pretty three-years’ wife? Are you content and satisfied to live On what your loving husband loves to give, And give to him your life? Are you content with work, — to toil alone, To <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> clean </a> things dirty and to soil things clean; To be a kitchen-maid, be called a queen, — Queen of a cook-stove throne? Are you content to reign in that small space -- A wooden palace and a yard-fenced land -- With other queens abundant on each hand, Each fastened in her place? Are you content to rear your children so? Untaught yourself, untrained, perplexed, distressed, Are you so sure your way is always best? That you can always know? Have you forgotten how you used to long In days of ardent girlhood, to be great, To help the groaning world, to serve the state, To be so wise — so strong? And are you quite convinced this is the way, The only way a woman’s duty lies -- Knowing all women so have shut their eyes? Seeing the world to-day? Having <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> no </a> dream of life in fuller store? Of growing to be more than that you are? Doing the things you know do better far, Yet doing others - more? Losing no love, but finding as you grew That as you entered upon nobler life You so became a richer, sweeter wife, A wiser mother too? What holds you? Ah, my dear, it is your throne, Your paltry queenship in that narrow place, Your antique labours, your restricted space, Your working all alone! Be not deceived! ‘Tis not your wifely bond That holds you, nor the mother’s royal power, But selfish, slavish service hour by hour -- A life with no beyond!The Ivy Green BY CHARLES DICKENS Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green, That creepeth o’er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed, To pleasure his dainty whim: And the mouldering dust that years have made Is a merry meal for him. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the Ivy green. Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings, And a staunch old heart has he. How closely he twineth, how tight he clings, To his friend the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> huge </a> Oak Tree! And slily he traileth along the ground, And his leaves he gently waves, As he joyously hugs and crawleth round The rich mould of dead men’s graves. Creeping where grim death has been, A rare old plant is the Ivy green. Whole ages have fled and their works decayed, And nations have scattered been; But the stout old Ivy shall never fade, From its hale and hearty green. The brave old plant, in its lonely days, Shall fatten upon the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> past </a> : For the stateliest building man can raise, Is the Ivy’s food at last. Creeping on, where time has been, A rare old plant is the Ivy green.Work without Hope <a href=" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge "target="_blank"> Samuel Taylor Coleridge </a> Lines Composed 21st February 1825 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair— The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing— And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> build </a> , nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> rich </a> streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live. The Story of Light BY PEGGY SHUMAKER Think of the woman who first touched fire to a hollow stone filled with seal oil, how she fiddled with fuel and flame until blue shadows before and after her filled her <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> house </a> , crowded the underground, then fled like sky-captains chasing the aurora’s whale tale green beyond the earth’s curve. Her tenth summer, the elders let her raise her issum, seal pup orphaned when hunters brought in her mother, their grins of plenty broad, red. The women slit the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> hard </a> belly. Plopped among the ruby innards steaming on rough-cut planks blinked a new sea-child whose first sound came out a question in the old language, a question that in one throaty bark asked who, meaning What family is this? What comfort do you provide for guests? Do you let strangers remain strangers? The women rinsed the slick pup in cool water, crafted a pouch for her to suck. Then the young girl whose hands held light even when the room did not brought this new being beside her bed, let it scatter babiche and split birch gathered for snowshoes, let it nose the caribou neck hairs bearding her dance fans. They held up the fans to their foreheads, playing white hair, playing old. In the time when women do not sew the seal danced at her first potlatch. And when the lamps burned down, no one could see any difference between waves in rock, waves in sea. The pup lifted her nose, licked salt from seven stars, and slipped light back among silvers and chum light among the ghostly belugas swimming far north to offer themselves.Eagle Plain BY ROBERT FRANCIS The American eagle is not aware he is the American eagle. He is never tempted to look modest. When orators advertise the American eagle’s virtues, the American eagle is not listening. This is his virtue. He is somewhere else, he is mountains away but even if he were near he would never make an audience. The American eagle never says he <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> will </a> serve if drafted, will dutifully serve etc. He is not at our service. If we <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> have </a> honored him we have honored one who unequivocally honors himself by overlooking us. He does not know the meaning of magnificent. Perhaps we do not altogether either who cannot touch him.The Two Streams BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR. Behold the rocky wall That down its sloping sides Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall, In rushing <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> river </a> -tides! Yon stream, whose sources run Turned by a pebble’s edge, Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun Through the cleft mountain-ledge. The slender rill had strayed, But for the slanting stone, To evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid Of foam-flecked Oregon. <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> So </a> from the heights of Will Life’s parting stream descends, And, as a moment turns its slender rill, Each widening torrent bends,— From the same cradle’s side, From the same mother’s knee,— One to long darkness and the frozen tide, One to the Peaceful Sea!Father and Son BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ Son: Father, you’re not Polonius, you’re reticent, But sure. I can already tell The unction and falsetto of the sentiment Which gratifies the facile <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> mouth </a> , but springs From no felt, had, and wholly known things. Father: You must let me tell you what you fear When you wake up from sleep, still drunk with sleep: You are afraid of time and its slow drip, Like melting ice, like smoke upon the air In February’s glittering sunny day. Your guilt is nameless, because its name is time, Because its name is death. But you can stop Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop. Son: But I thought time was full of promises, Even as now, the emotion of going away—— Father: That is the first of all its menaces, The lure of a future different from today; All of us always are turning away To the cinema and Asia. All of us go To one indeterminate nothing. Son: Must it be so? I question the sentiment you give to me, As premature, not to be given, learned alone When experience shrinks upon the chilling bone. I would be sudden now and rash in joy, As if I lived forever, the future my toy. Time is a dancing fire at twenty-one, Singing and shouting and drinking to the sun, Powerful at the wheel of a motor-car, Not thinking of death which is foreign and far. Father: If time flowed from your will and were a feast I would be wrong to question your zest. But each age betrays the same weak shape. Each moment is dying. You will try to escape From melting time and your dissipating soul By hiding your head in a warm and dark hole. See the evasions which so many don, To flee the guilt of time they become one, That is, the one number among masses, The one anonymous in the audience, The one expressionless in the subway, In the subway evening among so many faces, The one who reads the daily newspaper, Separate from actor and act, a member Of public opinion, never involved. Integrated in the revery of a fine cigar, Fleeing to childhood at the symphony concert, Buying sleep at the drugstore, grandeur At the band concert, Hawaii On the screen, and everywhere a specious splendor: One, when he is sad, has something to eat, An ice cream soda, a toasted sandwich, Or has his teeth fixed, but can always retreat From the actual pain, and dream of the rich. This is what one does, what one becomes Because one is afraid to be alone, Each with his own death in the lonely room. But there is a stay. You can stop Time as it dribbles from you, drop by drop. Son: Now I am afraid. What is there to be known? Father: Guilt, guilt of time, nameless guilt. Grasp firmly your fear, thus grasping your self, Your actual will. Stand in mastery, Keeping time in you, its terrifying mystery. Face yourself, constantly go back To what you were, your own history. You are always in debt. Do not forget The dream postponed which would not quickly get Pleasure immediate as drink, but takes The travail of building, patience with means. See the wart on your face and on your friend’s face, On your friend’s face and indeed on your own face. The loveliest woman sweats, the animal stains The ideal which is with us like the sky ... Son: Because of that, some laugh, and others cry. Father: Do not look past and turn away your face. You cannot depart and take another name, Nor go to sleep with lies. Always the same, Always the same self from the ashes of sleep Returns with its memories, always, always, The phoenix with eight hundred thousand memories! Son: What must I do that is most difficult? Father: You must meet your death face to face, You must, like one in an old play, Decide, once for all, your heart’s place. Love, power, and fame stand on an absolute Under the formless night and the brilliant day, The searching violin, the piercing flute. Absolute! Venus and Caesar fade at that edge, Hanging from the fiftieth-story ledge, Or diminished in bed when the nurse presses Her sickening unguents and her cold compresses. When the news is certain, surpassing fear, You touch the wound, the priceless, the most dear. There in death’s shadow, you comprehend The irreducible wish, world without end. Son: I begin to understand the reason for evasion, I cannot partake of your difficult vision. Father: Begin to understand the first decision. Hamlet is the example; only dying Did he take up his manhood, the dead’s burden, Done with evasion, done with sighing, Done with revery. Decide that you are dying Because time is in you, ineluctable As shadow, named by no syllable. Act in that shadow, as if death were now: Your own self acts then, then you know. Son: My father has taught me to be <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> serious</a> . Father: Be guilty of yourself in the full looking-glass.In the Middle of Dinner BY CHRIS ABANI My mother put <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> down </a> her knife and fork, pulled her wedding ring from its groove, placing it contemplatively on her middle finger. So natural was the move, so tender, I almost didn’t notice. Five years, she said, five years, once a week, I wrote a letter to your father. And waited until time was <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> like </a> ash on my tongue. Not one letter back, not a single note. She sighed, smiling, the weight gone. This prime rib is really tender, isn’t it? she asked.Home and the Homeless BY ELIZABETH WOODY The buildings are worn. The trees are strong and ancient. They bend against the grid of electric lines. The windows are broken by the homeless and the cold past. <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> I </a> am home on the yard that spreads mint, pales the Victorian roses, takes into it the ravaged lilac tree. The black bulk of plastic lies about stopping unwanted weeds for the Landlord. Tattered, the cedar tree is chipped to dry heaps of recklessness. The unwanted spreads by the power of neglect. The wear of <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> traffic </a> says that we are out of time, must hurry. Age, the creak in the handmade screen door fades behind itself.The Portrait BY EDITH SÖDERGRAN For my little ballads, those <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> strange </a> , sunset-red laments, spring paid me a gull’s egg. I bade my lover paint <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> my </a> portrait on its thick shell. He painted a new bulb in brown soil— on the other side, a powdery mound of sand. The Bones of August BY ROBIN EKISS i. Not to go backward, not to watch the women peddling in reverse past the church, the priest in his black habit receding from the chapel door. Not to go backward, the bones of August becoming the bones of <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> march </a> , branch of dogwood picked clean by frost. Not to say Yes when asked the question all women wait to hear, Are you anything like your mother? Not to be photographed in her dress like a saint carrying the instrument of her martyrdom, Agnes, and her try of breasts— or to throw the bouquet into the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> grave </a> where Bartholomew hides with his bloody knife. Not to burn half the house down— and build half the house up. Not to forgive the bad child when even the bad house is forgiven. Not to care, not to carry the bones of August into September, foiled with redness and nothing to squander but the buds of spring dormant in their boughs. Not to ask, Did you love her? and leave the answer in the ground, where everything difficult is buried. ii. Attend the <a href="http://twinery.org/2/#stories/90f9080b-4197-bd75-4e9e-d0b13ffc5cac/play "target="_blank"> dead </a> , then welcome the bride— backward, as Jews do, reading Hebrew, right to left. First the mourning, then the celebration. Backward, taking off the beautiful face of forgetting, two names with the same face— all this time a woman waiting inside me to marry. Invisible, impermanent, windmill girl in her cage of breath, insect girl in her element: impenetrable shell, putting on the beautiful face of forgetting— Fury Sybil Isis one of us wakes in her graveyard of guilt, filamentary as fiber optics, one of us sleeps on in the temple, lulled by the metronomic pulse of longing— Did you love her? Are you anything? That other girls is dead. That other girl is dead. What else can be said about that other girl? iii. Same as mine, skin of her hands laid over the ivory bones, dark map of the body— Yes— it was dark, but I was darker on the inside. When she was young she was “a great beauty,” in the same sense that “a roomful of adults” is rarely ever. I was never like her, flattered like a map under glass, slender as an axle in a turbine— enigma relic: feet of steel, legs of wood, cabinet of curiosity. Even her reflection in a spoon was beautiful. iv. Labor into longing: wild enthusiasm of the dynamo engine working in reverse— more power in the leaf of a flower than the paw of a bear. Is it necessary to remember absolutely everything? Golden hour on the birch- brailled bark, weathered barn stacked with malignant logs, sweet mulch of aether /ore in the morning air. We hung drapes over the mirrors, they were flowered, too— her bouquet a cabbage, assembled by a florist from 120 roses Incandescent light flattened their petals, made lace of their thorns. Uncanny—nothing in nature so rigid, nothing more harmful than her rare affection. v. August: honeymoon at Niagara, water shut off— bad luck. Two bodies, a man’s and a woman’s found face- down in the mud at the bottom of the gorge. Neglected on the cliffs above, Tesla’s alternating current station, powerless in its pure machinery, honeyed, lunar magnets waiting in their sockets for the current to resume. Enough about friction: this is about two bodies at the end of America, repelling each other under the polar rush of water, generating their own distance over time. Is it history or home that hurts us more? Did she look into the gorge as into his face when she said Yes— to see the downpour, even when it was damned? vi. Nothing in me wasted, a use for grief, even. I wore it on my left hand. I was married to it. I planted myself in the dirt: alphabets grew up from the bones of my feet. I drowned my heart in the lake. Black hole, such vanity— navigating the ear canals like so many gondoliers trolling the watery streets looking for someone to sing to. Beautiful fisherman who fished my heart out of its lake— I did not die. I revived. I wore her face on my fingers when I dug up my joy up from the ground, singing: Oh wooden coffin, woman’s body, boulder at home in its stone skin. vii. Yes, then, to all of it: to the drowned sea urchins, porcupines spined, and the black-brain coral that sleeps on the ocean’s floor, ruinously blue. Yes to the vultures that roost above the waterfall, that don’t surrender their nests at our dissolution, and to the bones that do. To remember is to open one door after another all along the white corridor to say Yes when asked, Are you anything? Did she love you? To go forward is to surrender the necklace of tears she gave me— this failed body with my name on it. [[An Index Poem]]